What are heatmaps? How are they useful?
A heatmap is a graphical representation of data where values are expressed as colours. Heatmaps provide an effective visual summary of information, because they synthesize data and then present it in a pictorial form.
Its major advantage as a presentation tool over a spreadsheet is that it allows for large volume of data to be communicated almost instantly. After all we mostly use our eyes to make sense of the world, not columns of numbers.
Within businesses, professionals use heatmaps to identify level of performance of different divisions of the company, to set investment priorities and to highlight areas of concern.
Traditionally, green color denotes the highest (best) values, yellow middle and progresses towards red to show low values that are areas of concern.
How to interpret heatmaps on Insight?
Insight shows the different data values in various shades of one color, instead of the traditional green, yellow, red etc. colors. The shade progresses from light to dark to denote low to high values.
In the below chart which shows the percent of active reservations by day of the week by booking days in advance, the lighter cells denote the days on which the percent is lower and vice-versa.
For example, if we take a certain day lets say Saturday, more number reservations were booked either 0-12 hours in advance, or 31+ days in advance or they were walk-ins (walk-ins is the highest on all days).